arXiv AI

Accurate in space, unreliable in time: how LLMs represent national cultural change

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent national cultural change over time, using more than two decades of World Values Survey data and the Inglehart‑Welzel cultural map. It finds that while LLMs generally place countries near their most recent surveyed positions, their representations lag behind current data, under‑capture the magnitude of change, introduce spurious movements, and rarely reproduce trajectory reversals. These temporal inaccuracies reveal a flattening effect that limits the models’ cultural awareness and raises concerns for evaluation, representational harms, and governance of culturally aware AI systems.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding

The paper introduces CAPRI, a dataset of conversations designed to test whether large language models (LLMs) can adapt their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds. Experiments show that while LLMs can infer a user’s cultural context and recall relevant conventions, they frequently fail to apply this knowledge when generating answers unless explicitly prompted to do so. The study also finds that LLMs’ cultural adaptations improve as more cues are provided, yet their default priors are not culture‑neutral and sometimes reflect the model’s country of origin.

By Yisong Miao, Jian Zhu, Vered Shwartz
arXiv AI
Oct 5

CuBEs: Culturally-Situated Behavioral Evaluations and the Limitations of Culture-Blind LLM Judges

CuBEs introduces culturally‑situated behavioral evaluations for large language models, adding cultural context to test scenarios and assessments. The authors built a human‑labeled dataset covering 12 cultures, revealing significant cross‑cultural differences that one‑size‑fits‑all judgments miss. Evaluating 13 LLMs shows that culturally situated tests uncover varied behaviors, such as Western political bias versus non‑Western religious or colonial biases, which standard evaluations overlook.

By Hoda Ayad, Tanu Mitra, Abhishek Mukherji
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Large Language Models, Machine-Assisted Cultural Analytics, and the Agentic Turn

The chapter discusses how large language models (LLMs) simplify the transformation of cultural material into analyzable variables and how LLM-driven agentic systems broaden machine assistance across research workflows. It examines key aspects of this emerging paradigm and its broader implications, arguing that LLMs increase scale, methodological diversity, and delegation while largely preserving the fundamental logic that underpins cultural measurement and claim formation.

By Andres Karjus
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 9

PLURAL: A Global Dataset for Value Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) are used worldwide, yet disproportionately reflect Western values, limiting their ability to represent diverse value systems. We introduce PLURAL, a large-scale, value-focused preference dataset grounded in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS), a nationally representative survey spanning 92 countries.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

CulTrace: Tracing Internal Cultural Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2508. 08879v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The growing deployment of large language models (LLMs) across diverse cultural contexts necessitates a deeper understanding of models' hidden representations of different cultures.

By Haeun Yu, Arnav Arora Seogyeong Jeong, Nadav Borenstein, Siddhesh Pawar, Jisu Shin, Jiho Jin, Junho Myung, Alice Oh, Isabelle Augenstein